This book grew out of the work developed at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Ian Stewart, which formed the core of my Ph.D. Thesis. Most of the results described were obtained in joint work with Ian; as usual under these circumstances, many have been published in research journals over the last two years. Part of Chapter 3 was also joint work with Peter Ashwin. I would like to stress that these were true collaborations. We worked together at all stages; it is meaningless to try to identify which idea originated from whom. While preparing this book, however, I felt that a mere description of the results would not be fitting. First of all, a book is aimed at a wider audience than papers in research journals. More importantly, the work should assume as little as possible, and it should be brought to a form which is pleasurable, not painful, to read.

Inhalt
1 Attractors in Dynamical Systems.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Basic definitions.- 1.3 Topological and dynamical consequences.- 1.4 Attractors.- 1.5 Examples and counterexamples.- 1.6 Historical remarks and further comments.- 2 Liapunov Stability and Adding Machines.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Adding Machines and Denjoy maps.- 2.3 Stable Cantor sets are Adding Machines.- 2.4 Adding Machines and periodic points: interval maps.- 2.5 Interlude: Adding Machines as inverse limits.- 2.6 Stable ?-limit sets are Adding Machines.- 2.7 Classification of Adding Machines.- 2.8 Existence of Stable Adding Machines.- 2.9 Historical remarks and further comments.- 3 From Attractor to Chaotic Saddle: a journey through transverse instability.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Normal Liapunov exponents and stability indices.- 3.3 Normal parameters and normal stability.- 3.4 Example: ?2-symmetric maps on ?2.- 3.5 Example: synchronization of coupled systems.- 3.6 Historical remarks and further comments.